"What's the matter?" Ethelid asked, already moving past Juliet and out of the tent.
"A wizard! I heard there's a wizard here!"
A woman came running toward the front of the procession, her voice high and ragged with urgency. Juliet followed Ethelid outside and saw her — wild-eyed, scanning the wagons with the frantic gaze of someone teetering on the edge of despair.
Yet her clothes were clean. No blood, no torn fabric, no dirt ground into her sleeves. She hadn't been attacked by bandits or monsters.
"Please — where is the wizard?"
The guild members exchanged glances and, almost reflexively, turned their eyes toward the tent.
"M-my name is Magda," the woman stammered, pressing a hand to her heaving chest. "I'm from the village of Kanavel — it's nearby, just beyond the ridge."
Her gaze darted anxiously between Juliet and Ethelid, as though trying to determine which of them might be the one she needed.
Juliet noticed and quietly stepped back.
Ethelid sighed, squared his shoulders, and stepped forward.
"I believe I'm the one you're looking for. What's happened?"
The words had barely left his mouth when Magda's legs buckled.
She dropped to her knees in the dirt before him, her hands clasped together so tightly her knuckles blanched white.
"Please — ***save my child.*** I beg you, wizard, help me!"
---
Magda's explanation came in breathless, fractured pieces. Juliet listened carefully and assembled the story as it emerged.
Five children had gone missing from the village. Magda's daughter was among them.
"I'm afraid this isn't something I can help with," Ethelid said, not unkindly. "In cases like this, you should petition your local lord to organize a search party. This isn't a matter for a wizard."
"But—" Magda's voice cracked.
Then she explained why she had come seeking a wizard specifically.
This mountainous region had long been known as the Back of the Great Dragon. Since ancient times, a legend persisted among the local villages: if children vanished in these mountains, only a wizard could bring them back.
"Some of the villagers are still out searching," Magda whispered, shaking her head weakly. "But I'm not sure they'll find the children in time..."
"Does such a legend actually exist?" Juliet murmured, leaning toward Ethelid.
He replied with a half-shrug.
"I've heard some old tale about wizards rescuing children kidnapped by a dragon. Whether it *exists* as proper folklore or simply as a grandmother's bedtime story, I couldn't say."
Ethelid was quiet for a moment. Then, furtively, he turned to Juliet.
"What would you do in a situation like this?"
Juliet blinked, caught off guard at being drawn into the conversation. She'd considered herself nothing more than a bystander.
"Why are you asking *me*?"
"Because neither Walter nor Theo are here."
She opened her mouth to object — *What does that have to do with anything?* — but the words died on her tongue.
The guild members had fallen silent. Every pair of eyes was fixed on her. Magda's tear-streaked face tilted upward, raw hope flickering in her gaze.
With Helen gone, and the rest of the family absent, the unspoken logic was painfully clear: Juliet was the closest thing to authority remaining in the camp. She was family — however recently and unexpectedly she'd appeared — and the decision fell to her.
*Of all the impossible positions to find myself in.*
If she were acting purely in the guild's best interests, she should decline. They were already behind schedule. The road was treacherous. This was not their responsibility.
But she could feel it — the quiet, steady weight of Ethelid's gaze beside her. He hadn't said it outright, but everything about him, from his posture to his silence, told her the same thing.
*He wanted to go.*
"Well..."
---
An hour later, Ethelid, Juliet, and Magda were climbing the mountain ridge.
Before setting out, Juliet had deliberated for what felt like an eternity before finally turning to Ethelid.
"If you want to go, I'll give my permission and won't stop you."
Ethelid, however, had promptly introduced his own condition.
"I'll go — if the lady accompanies me."
*But why me? I'm not even a sorceress...*
Juliet had found the demand deeply unfair, but she'd also recognized the trap. If she refused, the wizard would simply shrug and say, *Oh, then I'm afraid I can't go either — the lady won't accompany me.* He'd hand the guilt back to her like a parcel she hadn't ordered.
And beyond that — she couldn't ignore the look on Magda's face. The silent, desperate plea of a mother who had exhausted every other option.
So here she was, climbing a mountain in damp boots.
"Do we have much farther to go?" Juliet asked, her breath fogging in the cool air.
"No — there's a clearing just ahead," Magda replied over her shoulder.
Ethelid fell into step beside Juliet and lowered his voice. "Don't worry. Even if we can't find the children and get lost in the mountains ourselves, the guild will come looking for us." He paused. "Eventually."
The plan was straightforward: find the children and bring them back to the village. If the search proved fruitless, return before sunset regardless.
"Here." Magda stopped, gesturing to a small open space nestled between the trees. "It's somewhere around here."
She looked at the flattened grass, the scuffed dirt where small feet had worn paths between the rocks, and her eyes filled with tears.
"The children always played here. But that day..."
Before they'd set out, Magda had explained that the village of Kanavel had only a handful of children. Five of them — inseparable as fingers on a hand — always played together at the top of this ridge. Two days ago, they'd come up here as usual.
They never came back.
*Two days.*
Juliet and Ethelid exchanged a glance, the same grim thought passing silently between them.
*If two days have already passed — are those children still alive?*
Juliet believed the most likely explanation was that the children had simply gotten lost while playing. That was far more probable than abduction by a dragon. But probability offered cold comfort to a mother. And the harder question remained: no matter how familiar these children were with the terrain, could they survive two days in these mountains without adults? Without food or shelter?
"Dana!"
Magda's voice echoed off the rocks, raw and breaking.
"If you can hear me, answer! Dana! It's Mom!"
---
They searched together, fanning out across the ridge and calling into the trees.
The rain had stopped by now, but the mountain path remained slick and treacherous — every stone glazed with moisture, every foothold uncertain. Juliet picked her way carefully, scanning the dense undergrowth on either side.
Then she noticed something.
*...What is that?*
Deep in the thicket, between the dark trunks of close-growing trees, something swayed — a ripple in the air where nothing should have moved.
"Sir Ethelid." She reached out and tugged at his sleeve. "Did you see that?"
"See what?"
Juliet stared into the undergrowth. There — again. A faint shimmer, like light smoke curling through the branches, gone before she could fully fix her eyes on it.
A cold thread of unease wound itself around her chest.
"...I think we should leave," she whispered, pulling Ethelid and Magda closer. "Immediately. We'll come back with more people."
Something was behind those bushes. She couldn't name it, couldn't see it clearly — but every instinct she possessed was screaming the same thing.
***Go. Now.***
They turned to retreat.
**It happened without warning.**
The solid rock beneath their feet simply *ceased to exist*.
One moment, ground. The next — nothing.
"***Aaaaah!***"
Their screams tore through the mountain air as all three lost their footing and plummeted into darkness.
---
## — Beneath the Mountain —
Juliet felt as though every bone in her body had shattered.
"Ah..."
She pried her eyes open. Pitch darkness surrounded her — absolute, suffocating, without a single point of reference.
*Where am I?*
"Oh, you've come to your senses."
Ethelid's voice drifted toward her, impossibly calm. For one disoriented, pain-addled moment, Juliet genuinely suspected she'd been kidnapped by a mad wizard.
But as her eyes slowly adjusted and Ethelid's face materialized in the gloom — smudged with dirt, a shallow cut across his cheekbone, his expression more weary than sinister — she dismissed the thought.
"Is it bad?" she asked hoarsely.
"Miss Juliet, if you could see yourself, you wouldn't need to ask." He sighed, glanced around, and pressed something into her hands. "Drink. Slowly."
A bottle of water, half empty.
Juliet drank. A few drops escaped down her chin and struck the stone floor with soft, echoing *plinks*. Only after the water had eased the raw scrape in her throat could she properly take in her surroundings.
"Where are we?"
"Beneath the mountain, I believe."
"*Beneath* the mountain?"
"Do you remember saying we should go back?" Ethelid's tone was dry, almost conversational. "Immediately after that, the ground vanished beneath us. When I opened my eyes, we were here."
Juliet looked around again, more carefully this time.
They were in a narrow fissure within the rock — a crack in the mountain's interior, just wide enough for several people to sit abreast but not much more. The walls were rough and damp, glistening faintly where moisture seeped through unseen veins in the stone. Above them, the gap through which they'd fallen was invisible — swallowed entirely by darkness.
"We've fallen too deep for daylight to reach," Ethelid said, following her gaze upward. "And I believe it's night by now, which doesn't help."
*A perfectly logical assessment,* Juliet thought, *delivered as though he were discussing the weather.*
"We survived the fall thanks to this." He patted the ground beside him. A thick, spongy carpet of moss covered the cave floor — dense enough to have cushioned their impact.
Juliet was on the verge of complimenting his remarkable composure when a prickling awareness crept across her skin. She stiffened, her eyes sweeping the darkness beyond Ethelid's shoulder.
"Ethelid — is there anyone else here besides us?"
"Yes."
He sighed quietly, then raised a finger to his lips.
"Everyone except you and me is asleep. So — quietly, please."
Juliet followed his gaze to the far corner of the cave.
There, huddled together like a litter of frightened animals, Magda lay curled around five small bodies. The children. Their faces were smudged and tear-streaked, but their chests rose and fell with the steady rhythm of sleep.
"They were safe the whole time?" Juliet breathed.
"Something like that."
Ethelid's tone hardened — a subtle shift, but unmistakable.
Juliet frowned, curious at the change. She turned to look at the opposite side of the cave.
And immediately understood.
"...Who are *they*?"
Several figures sat against the far wall — adults, awake or dozing, their silhouettes rough-edged in the darkness.
"They claim to be members of the Black Mane Guild," Ethelid said flatly.
"The *what*?" Juliet stared at him, bewildered.
*Who in the world are these people?*
"You haven't heard of them?"
Ethelid settled back against the cave wall, and in a low, measured voice, began to explain everything that had happened during the half day Juliet had spent unconscious.